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Building on the success of January’s Makers Night and the excellent Fabcamp this weekend, we’re holding the next Makers Night on Wednesday 16th February.

Once again it will be in the basement of the LJMU Art and Design Academy (directions and address), starting at around 6:30pm for a 7pm start.

It’s open to anyone and everyone – you don’t need to know anything beforehand, come along and find out more first hand.

The evening will run something like this…

7pm: Welcome and housekeeping7:10pm: “One Minute Project Pitches” – If you’ve got a project or an idea for a project and want to get some help, then here’s a chance to pitch it to the whole group to find someone to lend a hand or expertise.7:20pm: Get Excited and Make Things. Work on your project or learn something new. This is the meat of the evening and will include (but is not limited to):

A “Beginners Arduino” session if anyone wants to get started with Arduino or electronics. Ideally bring your laptop with you if you want to do this.

Laser-cutting. I expect quite a few of the people who came to Fabcamp will be along to get some more time on the laser-cutters but you don’t need to have been at Fabcamp to find out more and have a go…

General hacking. I.e. work on your own project with like-minded individuals on hand to be impressed when you get something working, or to offer advice and sympathetic head-scratching if it doesn’t

Makerbot Cupcake building. Local company Blue Fountain have very generously bought a Cupcake 3D printer kit which will hopefully have arrived by then, so we’ll need some people to start building it…

A tutorial workshop session. We haven’t finalised one for February yet, but hopefully each month one of the hackspace members will lead a simple project tutorial – something like making an Arduino from scratch, building a solar chime, or a simple FM transmitter. Check on the mailing list to find out if we’ve got anything organised.

8:45pm: We get kicked out of the ADA and retire to a nearby hostelry for a well earned pint.

As part of the ongoing mini-reboot of the Liverpool Hackspace, we’re making the monthly meetings more focused and hands on (rather than just drinking and chatting) evenings, from next Wednesday. It’s a good chance to get to grips with electronics, hardware hacking and digital fabricating…

We’ll be meeting at the Art and Design Academy (directions and address), on the 19th Jan at around 6.30 for a 7 o’clock start – finishing at 8.45 so that we can make it to a public house for post meeting refreshments.

As this is our first meeting at ADA and we’ll hopefully be having some students attend we’re aiming to make it an introductory session so that the students aren’t dropped into a room full of geeks talking about resistors and the finer points of TC54 usage. We’re hoping that we can initiate some cross-disciplinary use of the workshop as well as introducing some fine art, design and architecture students to the joys of making/hacking things. It’s a great opportunity for us to get access to their digital fabrication stuff, as well as the general workshop – I’m personally hoping to learn some none-digital stuff from the students that already know how to use the workshops.

The general structure of the evening is likely to be as follows, with some obvious flexibility in timing if any talks run over.

1. Welcome – Adrian McEwen.
2. Housekeeping – Lol Baker.
3. Fabrication lightning talk – Andy Goodwin
4. Physical computing talk – Adrian McEwen
5. a. ARDx kits (introduction to Arduino), or
b. Planning for those interested in building the Cupcake (when it arrives), or
c. General hacking for those that wish to do so.
6. Wrap up with Q&A on next event
7. Retire to public house for refreshments.

If anyone has anything they think they’d like to add to point 5 then please let us know. If you’re unsure what you could work on, or aren’t really sure where to begin, come anyway and I’m sure we can find a project for you to do. If you’re thinking you’d rather just lurk, then come and lurk in person – we’re pretty friendly – honest!

It would be great if you could make it and please feel free to invite anyone else you know who may be interested. It’s a great opportunity for us to increase the membership and the breadth of knowledge of the Liverpool hacking community, and hopefully provide a temporary but warm space for us to hold our meetings while we’re looking for space.

Although things have been quiet here on the blog, there’s been a flurry of activity on the mailing list of late, and even more offline. We’ve been getting more proactive about finding a space – both in the short-term so we can get on with building things at meetings rather than just drink beer and chat; and also looking at getting a full-time permanent space.

We’ll be discussing the upcoming plans on Wednesday, so it would be good for anyone wanting to find out more or get involved in helping move things forwards to come along.

We’re convening at the new Leaf on Bold Street (the old Microzine shop) anytime after 6pm for a 7pm start. It’s not clear if Adam will be wearing his Tron costume, but if he does we’ll be easy to spot. Otherwise keep an eye out for Bubblino or random bits of electronics on a table.

It’s been far too long since we last got together for a drink and a chat about all things hardware hacking, so Adam has booked the upstairs at the Peacock on Seel Street for this coming Monday evening at 7pm.

A very apologetic Scott assures me that Bad Format will be open on Tuesday, so the meeting is going to be held there. I’ve been playing around with some little op-amp chips to make an annoying high-pitched noise-making circuit, so I’ll be playing with that to see if I can make it sound any nicer. I think Ross Dalziel will be along to tell us about his Nintendo DS and random electronic instrument orchestra event that he’s putting on at FACT.

UPDATE: We’ve just heard they can’t get anyone to staff the bar for us at the Bad Format Social Club, so we’ll be meeting round the corner at the Ship and Mitre on Dale Street. We might even be able to book the room upstairs, but I’m waiting to hear back from them about that.

A quick heads-up for the next Liverpool meeting. It’s going to be at the Bad Format Social Club next Tuesday, 3rd November 2009 at 7pm.

A fairly low turnout at the last meeting, mainly due to it only being announced the day before the event, it clashing with GeekUp Chester, and having to switch venues on the day.

We ended up in the bar upstairs at FACT, looking slightly out-of-place with the ebb and flow of cinema-goers. Still, Dominic managed to find us for his first visit to one of the meetings, and he even lugged this rather impressive battery box from his electric bike project along with him.

He accidentally connected the charging circuit up the wrong way a while back, and fears that he’s released some of the magic smoke that makes it all work. He was hoping that we might be able to shed some light on how to check if the MosFETs are still okay, but all we managed was some commiserating and general poking around at the circuit. One for the future I think…

That’s right, the next Liverpool hackspace meeting is tomorrow night. We’ll be at the Bad Format Social Club on Trueman street from 7pm till around 9pm. I’ll be bringing one of the Oomlout beginner’s Arduino kits to have a play with shift registers, and in case anyone wants to have a look at what you get with it.